We Bought A House!

As of April 30, 2013, we are officially homeowners!  We definitely weren't  planning on owning a home anytime soon, but life has a funny way of changing your plans.

The weekend after Hank's baby blessing, we found out that the owners of our last home were planning on selling and we had 60 days to find a new place.  I got stressed and upset - I just brought a brand-new baby home!  How were we going to find the time to get a new place to rent, then pack up a move?  I DESPISE moving, and I had often told Dustin that I didn't want to move again until we were ready to buy a home, so the thought of moving into a rental and then moving AGAIN a few years after that made me a little bitter.

Dustin and I started doing research and combing through every ad on Craigslist trying to find a place.  There are some incredibly bizarre places for rent (tile floors in the master bedroom, extremely interesting choices in landscaping, and differences of opinion in what constitutes as "recently updated" in a home, among other things).  We were having a hard time finding a place that felt livable, when we stumbled upon a place for rent in an area of Fremont called Ardenwood.  I'm not normally one to act on my feelings, but I remember telling Dustin that I felt like that was the place where we were supposed to be living.

We quickly contacted the owner and expressed our interest.  We submitted our application and waited. And waited.  Finally, a week later, the owner told us he had so much interest in the house that he was going to sell instead.  We were sad, but continued to look at other places.  A week or so after that, we started discussing the possibility of owning a home in Fremont rather than renting - something we'd never previously talked about.

We came to the conclusion that maybe we should buy a home, and ended up contacting the owner of the home we originally wanted to rent and asked him how much he was going to sell the house for.  He told us, and then mentioned he hadn't yet gotten an agent yet, and that we could possibly negotiate a deal to factor in not having to pay for real estate agent fees.  After a very tense few weeks, we settled on an agreeable price and started working through our escrow window.

I'm so lucky to have Dustin sift through all the loan documentation, because it all looked pretty complicated to me!  We got through all our checkpoints on time (with a lot of Dustin babysitting our lendor!), and closed escrow April 30.  We've been keeping ourselves busy with painting, moving things over little by little, cleaning, and arranging for some minor work to be done on the house.  In the end, we're both very grateful to have this home to call our own.  Now we're looking forward to creating new memories in this house!